Month: May 2016

You may notice something slightly different about Graduateland when visiting our website these days…

Yes, it’s a completely new logo – and, more importantly, it’s our very first logo after having stuck with the good old -letteringpretty much from the very beginning.

The old lettering has served us well for years. And, of course, we know all those sayings:

“Never change a winning team.”

“If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.”

We just don’t entirely agree with them.

So why the change? Well…

…because it’s about time.

Let’s start with the most obvious reason: the practicality of a logo that needs to work in a digital world. What we needed was a significant visual brand that could work in all the different digital channels that we have. Approximately 13% of our website traffic is already coming from mobile devices and every trend study about online recruitment will tell you that the ratio is going to tip further in that direction. That’s even more pointed when we’re talking about the youngest generation of job-seekers. We want to give these users and customers something to look at – an icon that is easily recognisable on any screen size.

Having taken a couple of detours during the development process that covered different shapes, colours and sizes, we have now landed with a simple, but distinctively sharp icon (plus new logo font) that responds to different formats.

Our UX Designer, Nik, set out to create a visual that our users could automatically identify with Graduateland. Repositioning the G & L letters to create a graduation hat was one of those ‘eureka’ moments during our research and development phase.

A sketch from before the ‘eureka’-moment

If you do something, you might as well do it properly, so we didn’t stop at the colours either: away we went from the traditional blue to a new green tone. Users and customers may recognise the colour from the major actions and buttons that take them around our platform, for example, when sending an application or posting a job. We like the green because it’s a starting signal, a “go ’n’ get them”-colour, that represents the kind of interactive recruitment that we want to facilitate on the Graduateland Network.

A sneak peek into the colour debate

…because we’re only just getting started.

Speaking of which, the Graduateland product team has been gearing up to make changes as well – a lot of them you are already seeing, and more are still in the pipeline.

The logo is really only a fraction of the transition that our product and service has been through in just a couple of months – a process that is still ongoing:

We want to fundamentally improve and change the traditional way of recruitment by making it more interactive, relevant and clever.

Create talent pools, enabling employer branding managers to build up talent pipelines in order to communicate and interact with separate target groups,

Leverage candidate data (of preferences and behaviour) in more intelligent ways to help recruiters make better decisions in their recruitment strategy.

And that’s just a small excerpt of the roadmap until the end of the year.

So, going back to those famous sayings about change…

…here’s our take:

Over the course of the past year we have totally redesigned our platform, defined our strategy for making digital recruitment as interactive as we possibly can, and – most recently – bought our biggest competitor. Of course, we change our logo.